The Hydrilla Hunter weighs 62 lb. and can travel at 1.3 mph. Credit: Matthew Modoono, Northeastern University

As a native of Connecticut and a boater, Northeastern University student Colin McKissick is well aware of an invasive plant that is wreaking havoc in the state’s bodies of water.

Native to Australia, Africa, and parts of Asia, the hydrilla plant found its way to Florida in the 1950s, when it was used to bed aquariums because it doesn’t need much nutrition or light to grow.

Since then, hydrilla has been labeled the “world’s worst invasive aquatic plant” as it spreads and grows rapidly and is difficult to control. The plant can now be found in many parts of the U.S., but Connecticut has been hit particularly hard by the noxious weed.

A 2020 survey of the Connecticut River commissioned by the Connecticut River Gateway Commission found hydrilla in 200 acres in the river’s lower third. Its dense strands make it difficult for native aquatic plants and marine life to thrive, and it often clogs boat propellers.

McKissick, a fifth-year Northeastern student, has experienced this firsthand while boating on the Connecticut River.

“Just going up on the river to get to the boat ports, a couple of times, our propeller would get clogged up with the plant, which is wild because you wouldn’t expect a plant to gum up an 80-horsepower engine,” he said.

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Northeastern team designs robot to detect aquatic weeds

Enter the Hydrilla Hunter, an autonomous robotic boat outfitted with a hyperspectral camera designed to detect and identify the invasive plant. McKissick helped develop the boat with a dozen other Northeastern engineering students as part of two capstone project classes.

Their goal is to provide the boat to plant scientists at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station to help them more quickly identify and survey where hydrilla can be found and stop it from growing further.

The project is a collaboration between Northeastern’s electrical engineering department, the mechanical engineering department, the Robotics and Intelligent Vehicles Research Lab, and the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. 

Students working under Charles DiMarzio, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, created the internals of the device, which include an imaging system, a renewable battery, and communication systems.

Students working under Randall Erb, associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, developed the boat’s housing and navigation system.

“We came up with a solution to tackle this, which is to automate the detection of the hydrilla and notify the scientists of its location to extract it before it takes over the Connecticut water bodies,” says McKissick, who worked on the electrical and computer engineering side of the project.

How the Hydrilla Hunter works

The robotic boat works in a three-step process. 

First, the user pinpoints where on the map the robot should go with a homebase system separate from the robot. As it hits those waypoints, the robot scans the surface below for hydrilla. If it detects any, the user can pin the location where the plant was detected.

The robotic boat weighs 62 lb. (28.1 kg), can travel at speeds of up to 1.3 mph (2 kph), and can operate for 90 minutes on a charge. It can either be controlled remotely or operate autonomously, explained Daniel T. Simpson, a fourth-year student who worked on the mechanical engineering side of the project. 

“I can manually control it and tell it to move forward, backward, and I can flip a switch and the robot’s software will say, ‘OK, let me look at the GPS waypoints I was told to go to, and let me start going through those points,’” he said.  

Jessica Healey, a fourth-year student working in the mechanical engineering group, said the mechanical and electrical engineering teams worked closely together to develop the project. 

“Throughout the semester, we would meet up monthly, sometimes more frequently depending on what was going on, and just touch base with each other,” she recalled.

Northeastern’s autonomous robotic boat is outfitted with a hyperspectral camera to detect and identify the invasive hydrilla plant. Credit: Matthew Modoono, Northeastern University

Hyperspectral perception helps distinguish plant types

Methods currently used to survey for the invasive plant involve scientists on boats searching for several hours a week using heavy underwater cameras. Distinguishing the plant can also often be a challenge because it looks similar to native species. 

That’s what makes the robot’s hyperspectral camera ideal for this kind of situation, noted Lisa Bryne, a fifth-year student who worked on the electrical and computer engineering side of the project. Hyperspectrical cameras work by capturing a range of wavelength greater than what the human eye can comprehend. 

“These plants look incredibly similar, and the data in the infrared is really valuable to be able to distinguish the plants,” Bryne said.

The project is a collaboration among Northeastern departments and lab and the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. Credit: Matthew Modoono, Northeastern University

Experiential discovery drives Northeastern robotics researchers

The idea for the project was born out of discussions the students had with Taskin Padir, professor of electrical and computer engineering and head of Northeastern’s Robotics and Intelligent Vehicles Research Lab.

Through the lab, Padir had already drafted a National Science Foundation proposal with Jeremiah Foley, a plant scientist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station about using robotics to help solve the hydrilla problem. 

“We’ve been thinking about this problem from an environmental robotics perspective for a while,” Padir said. “It’s a [relatively] unknown yet important problem.” 

Foley said he has big plans for how he’ll like to use the system. Ideally, the station would like to hire a number of technicians to bring the robot to bodies of waters in Connecticut where fishermen typically work, he said. They sometimes unintentionally carry pieces of hydrilla with them where they fish between bodies of water. 

“Rather than getting out to a water body and having us drive around for hours on end, we can send a robot in, and my technicians can do it,” said Foley. “I can stay back in the lab and collaborate with them.” 

Solving these kinds of problems follows the stated mission of Northeastern’s Institute of Experiential Robotics, of which Padir is the director. 

“We always talk about four pillars of experiential robotics, and one of them is experiential discovery,” Padir said. “That doesn’t happen in the lab. It happens outside, when we reach out to stakeholders, when we try to understand the problems that need to be solved. We usually don’t approach the problem by saying ‘Oh we have a robot here. Let’s solve your problem.’” 

“What we do is try to understand the problem, what the bottlenecks are, and come back to the lab to try and create a solution toward solving that problem,” he added. 

The Northeastern students took Padir’s suggestion and ran with it, working directly with Foley to help develop a useful robotic tool. 

“What’s cool about our project is that we actually had a stakeholder say, ‘Hey, we have this huge problem, can you help us engineer a solution?’ That’s where we came in,” said Arjun Fulp, a fourth-year student who was in the university‘s electrical engineering capstone group.

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COBRA is among the Institute for Experiential Robotics. Credit: Matthew Modoono, Northeastern University

BOSTON — Robots in Northeastern University’s new EXP building wield chopsticks, rotate platforms and look like snakes. Roboticists at the Institute for Experiential Robotics’ lab said they are conducting transformative research.

The robots are handling chopsticks for precise manipulation. Research continues with a snake-like robot created for NASA’s BIG Idea Challenge that can navigate in sandy environments like the moon. And the lab has fabrication rooms for electronics, 3D printing, and laser cutting.

The new space takes up the majority of the first level of the eight-story science and engineering complex on the university‘s Boston campus. Its high bay area is about the size of a basketball court. It is decked out with robotics systems spanning the technological gamut, including collaborative robots, industrial robot arms, mobile robots, drones, virtual reality systems, and much more.

The institute also has space on the seventh floor of EXP that includes more robots, as well as desk and laboratory space for researchers to conduct their work.

Northeastern lab focuses on human-robot interaction

“Our mission is straightforward in my mind — enrich human experiences through meaningful development and deployment of robotics technology,” said Taskin Padir, a Northeastern robotics professor and the director of the institute. 

“We’ve been working with the design team for the past six years even before the groundbreaking of the building,” he said. “We had a vision for the space where we can demonstrate what we mean by ‘experiential robotics.’”

Several Northeastern students and faculty members in the lab are working on projects being led by Padir.

VERA could change how workcells look

As part of a National Science Foundation grant, Northeastern developed a series of robotics applications designed to help workers in the seafood packaging industry use robots to move and pack products.

One of those systems involved creating a workstation that features an assistive robotic table. The name of the robotic system is VERA, which stands for “voxel-enabled robotic assistant.”

Embedded in the table is a series of robotic cube-like devices called voxels. The voxels are able to spin to move of an object, such as plastic packaging. The workcell also features a mounted camera to track the movement of an object.

“The idea here was motivated by us having gone to seafood manufacturing sites and seeing people cut up really large fish like tuna and noticing that they had a lot of trouble moving around certain parts,” explained Mark Zolotas, a research scientist at Northeastern. “So that motivated us to design a robot that wouldn’t interfere with your workspace.”

It’s a little different than what one would expect a typical automated workcell to look, since there are no robotic arms involved, he noted. 

“We sort of see it as being a general way of rethinking about the way we view robots in general,” said Zolotas.

VERA uses voxels to move objects. Credit: Matthew Modoono, Northeastern University

Institute for Experiential Robotics conducts interdisciplinary research

As of now, 20 faculty members working in a number of disciplines including robotics, artificial intelligence, computer science, physical therapy and entrepreneurship have a presence in the new space, Padir said.

“It’s not the space or equipment that creates knowledge or pushes the boundaries of research,” he added. “It’s the people. Without researchers, we cannot do anything. It works in a hierarchical way — we have faculty who set the vision for projects then we have full-time postdoctoral researchers who help guide the Ph.D. students. We also have a very large cohort of master’s students in robotics. I envision they will get involved.”

“The institute also always provides experiential learning opportunities for our undergraduates. We have a track record of recruiting qualified students in our institute, so they will get involved in our research,” Padir said.  

Hanumant Singh, a professor of robotics at Northeastern, has a number of robots housed in the lab, including robots designed for underwater use. He says one of the key innovations of the lab is that it lets robotics researchers work together in a shared space. 

“The biggest and the most important part of this is that we are working as a collaborative,” said Singh, who notes the lab’s large open space allows for modularity and allows researchers to use it any way they see fit. “It’s an open space that does not belong to anybody that’s reconfigurable based on the project and the people that are working on stuff.” 

Julie Marble, executive director of the institute, echoed Singh’s sentiment.  

“One of the main goals for the Institute for Experiential Robotics is to become the flagship for robotics at Northeastern,” she said. “If you want to have robotics at that level, you need to be not only interdisciplinary but you also need to have a lot of collaboration. One of the goals of this space is to create a space where all of our faculty and their grad students can work together collaboratively.”

COBRA copies biology to roll onward

Doctoral students Adarsh Salagame and Kruthika Gangaraju are certainly taking advantage of the space. They were part of the team behind the COBRA system, or the Crater Observing Bio-inspired Rolling Articulator.

Northeastern snake-like robot was created for NASA’s BIG Idea Challenge, which called on teams of students to develop a robotic system designed to navigate difficult terrain. Alierez Ramezani, a Northeastern assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, led the team that developed the project.

The researchers’ goal was to develop a robot that could operate on the lunar south pole. They turned to nature to find a solution, said Salagame during a demonstration. 

“Snakes are well-documented to be able to operate in these sandy environments,” he said. “Other typical robots don’t operate in these kinds of environments, so that’s where the snake locomotion came about.” 

One notable aspect of the COBRA system is its ability to connect both of its ends to create a perfect circle, which allows it to easily roll down hills while using little energy, explained Marble. 

“It can travel an extremely long distance without losing any power,” she said. 

Northeastern Ph.D. student Adarsh Salagame works on a snake-like robot in the Experiential Institute of Robotics’ new lab space inside the EXP research complex. Credit: Matthew Modoono, Northeastern University

HASHI takes a chopstick approach to manipulation

Austin Allison is another one of Padir’s students. A doctoral student studying bioengineering, he is part of the research team that created HASHI, or the Highly Adaptable Seafood Handling Instrument for packaging. 

Allison showed the robotic system in action, which includes a robot arm and end-of-arm tools that look like chopsticks. (Hashi is also the Japanese word for chopsticks.) 

The robot is designed to handle and move small pieces of fish food like sushi, he said. And what’s the best way to handle sushi? With chopsticks, of course. 

“We thought, ‘Well, there’s probably been thousands of civilizations and billions of people throughout history that have used chopsticks not only for sushi but [also] to cook entire meals,’” Allison recalled.  

He noted that each chopstick appendage has three degrees of freedom and can be controlled using a video game controller. The robot chopsticks are able to manipulate the items in hand fairly easily. Ideally, this system could be used for packaging of pre-made meals, such as Lunchables.

“There’s a term in robotics called ‘hand manipulation,’ which is if you want to think of picking something up and doing it like a pinch and roll,” said Allison. “It’s interesting to be able to do it on a small scale.”

HASHI uses videogame controls and could help with seafood packaging. Credit: Matthew Modoono, Northeastern Universit

Northeastern dedicates space at EXP for robotics 

Allison said that the new robotics lab has been a great addition and that he loves that he now has more space to do dedicated research. 

“Our desks are a bit more separated from loud and distracting machinery, as well as larger hardware that is kept on the first floor,” Allison said. “We also have more dedicated rooms for fabrication, like a purpose-build machine shop, an electronics/3D printing/laser cutting room, etc.” 

As he progresses through his doctorate, Allison said he’s excited to check out more of what’s on offer in EXP. 

“Having future access to some of the previously unavailable tooling in the first floor of EXP — waterjet cutter, CNC router and mill, welding, etc. — will enable me to efficiently prototype and create more advanced hardware for future robotics projects and endeavors,” added Allison.

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